The mind of a child

“Watching my 5 year-old son play one day outside, brought to remembrance an image I had from my childhood. My mother told me of a neighbor’s boy they had seen one day acting out his fantasies of being Superman. It was the mid-1950s and probably Superman cartoons were all the rage on television.

I decided to try to capture that moment of a little boy with his mother’s kitchen towel around his neck and a borrowed kitchen chair. In the mind of a child he could fly! Of course the image is filled with symbolism of flight – the sheets blowing in the wind, the dandelion and the toy airplane.”

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Technical aspects: The tricycle to the right was modeled in Rhino3D from my wife’s tricycle that she rode as a child in the 1950s.

The tin toy airplane was based on a real collectors item from the 1950s that I saw in a toy museum recently. Even the chair is modeled on the chairs we had in our kitchen in the mid-1960s.

Rhino3D 2.0 was used to model all items including the fence, wash line, kitchen towel and cape and the sheets. XFrog 3.5 was used to model the dandelion, but the individual seeds blowing around were created with a combination of Rhino3D and Bryce primitives.

The grass between the paving stones and the weeds against the fence were created with Bantam 3D’s Grass a marvelous little utility.

The child was created in Poser 4 with DAZ3D’s Millennium Preschool Boy and Clothing Pack. His hair is a heavily modified Wedge Cut hair from DAZ3D.

All objects were exported into Bryce 5 and a combination of scanned textures and procedural materials used on various items. Apart from the sun, a single radial light was placed as a filler behind the child and a second spotlight used to highlight the child’s face.

Bryce 5’s Depth of Field feature was used to add depth to the image before bringing it into Corel PhotoPaint 10. a slight Gaussian Blur and Desaturation was used to create the look of a 1950s photograph and a vignette effect used finally. No other post-production work was done.

Worlds in the Making